The Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle group holds regular sessions to discuss scholarship on themes like the extraction and use of metal ores and mineral deposits, conceptions of value and economy, and the dynamics of circulation, reuse, and trade. Sessions are structured around a set of central questions pertaining to the project’s colloquium series: 1) Making and Unmaking Value; 2) Crafted Forms and Skillful Doing; 3) Assaying and the Sensorium; and, 4) Raw Materials and Residues. We seek to approach this broad set of themes from a variety of disciplinary standpoints — historical, archaeological, and anthropological — and address debates that emerge in scholarship from across several regions. 

This reading group is convened with our external collaborators. "Metals and Minerals" is the third phase of Agriculture and the Making of Science after "Soil/Earth" and "Water." The project is funded by the 2020 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded by the DFG. Please contact Anthony Quickel or Mannat Johal for more information.

Texts on Mining and Morals will be discussed:

Asmussen, Tina. 2020. Spirited Metals and the Oeconomy of Resources in Early Modern European Mining. Earth Sciences History 39 (2): 371-388.

Felten, Sebastian.  2023. “Managing Mineral Growth in Early Modern Mining.” Isis 114 (3): 626-630.

Kim, Nanny. 2019. “Silver Mines and Mobile Miners in the Southwestern Borderlands of the Qing Empire.”  JESHO 63 (1-2): 117-156.